How to Plan your Holiday Newsletter

Christmas is right around the corner, so it’s high time that you start working on your marketing efforts this holiday season. Try to be the first one to reach your customers with a meaningful message before the influx of holiday emails start crowding their inbox. You don’t want your message to get lost in a crowded inbox now, do you?

While it’s true that we still have a month before Christmas, you still need to start your holiday marketing ASAP. Remember, people start shopping for Christmas as early as August, so you will be missing on a lot of good traffic if you don’t start working soon.

Here are 4 tips that may be able to help you get started:

Timing is important

It is very important for you to send the right message at the right time. If you’re a marketer then you must have heard about the three big shopping days of the holiday season:

Black Friday - November 28

Small Business Saturday - November 29

Cyber Monday - December 1

These three dates are very important and they need to be marked on your calendar when you’re planning your campaign for this holiday season. These are the dates when the real shopping starts, and after these dates the customers will keep shopping right till the end of the month, so anything that you send now is going to decide if your customers want to shop with you or not.

Time your email perfectly. Folks will be gathering on Thanksgiving (November 27), it would really help your sales if you can get them talking about your holiday offers in their family gatherings. How about sending them a reminder of your Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday offers right before thanksgiving?

Simplify things for your customers

I think we’ll all agree that holiday shopping isn’t really a piece of cake. In fact it is one of the most stressful tasks that we have to go through during holiday season. Your customers have to deal with never-ending gift lists, huge congested crowds, and heaps of planning during the holiday season. In their current situation, they want everything simple and straight-forward.

Don’t promote your product in a way that is anything but simple. Your holiday emails should be based on the following five points:

1. Relevancy

Your customers will already be receiving plenty of irrelevant promotional emails and offers during the holiday season, and most of these offers will be going directly to their spam folder; make sure your email doesn’t become one of them. You need to give your customers exactly what they’re looking for if you want to have their attention.

You can get an idea of their preferences through social media. For example:
On your Facebook page, you may write a status: This Christmas I want __

Your customers will be replying with whatever they desire. This will give you an idea of what the masses want, and your email promotion can be based on those very items!

2. Give them Eye Candy: Images!

We all hate seeing long, never-ending bodies of text. While compiling your holiday newsletter, be sure to include some good pictures of the products that you want to highlight this Christmas. Include a small description with your products that explains the specialty of each of them. Your Customers may have some questions regarding your products, so give them an option to send you those questions if the need arises.

3. Use simple Designs

While complicated designs may look beautiful, they get annoying pretty quickly if your users can’t navigate easily. Use simple designs that are easy to navigate so that your customers can get to the items that they are interested in easily.

4. No Irrelevant links

As I said above, your customers are going to be pretty impatient during the holiday season, so you need to make things as easy for them as you can. This means that if you’re adding a link into your mail then that link should lead them directly to the product or service that you’re trying to promote. If you’re promoting a Christmas tree, the link should lead them to the Christmas tree!

5. Get a strong Call to Action

Your Call to Action ties your whole email together; make a strong one. Help your customers in taking the next step. Be witty in doing so though...if your call-to-action is weak then all your efforts may go in vain.

Make it personal

It is extremely important to establish an emotional connection with your reader. You need to show your customers the human aspect of your business. If you have a good holiday story to share, then share it with your customers.

Write your email in a strong voice, use either a first person or second person voice in your email. This will make your customers feel closer to you; however, this isn’t enough. You need to put yourself in your customer’s shoes, what are the kinds of problems that your customers may be facing during the holiday season? If you have solutions, then give it to them.

Apart from promotions, send them useful DIY tutorials, Recipes, and holiday tips. You should also complement your email efforts with social media. It would really please your customers if you create a separate holiday season board on Pinterest that includes stuff which may help the customers during the holiday season.

Make your Content Shareable

Now it’s time to harness your campaign’s full power. Make your content shareable. Include items in your newsletter that excite your customers so much, that they won’t be able to wait to tell their friends about it! Word-of-mouth is powerful, and this holiday season you should be benefiting from it in full force!

You can also give your customers an incentive to share your newsletter. Perhaps a discount coupon, or a bonus may encourage them to forward your email. Weigh your options as per your customer’s preferences and then choose accordingly.

If all goes well, your customers will keep coming in long after the Christmas decorations have been taken down and packed. So start planning today!

Author

Memuna is an MBA student who loves learning about marketing, specifically email marketing. She brings a lot of great experience to the Winning Email team and her passion for technology and communicating with people makes her a perfect fit.